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The coalescence of compact objects are a promising astrophysical sources ofgravitational wave (GW) signals. The ejection of r-process material from suchmergers may lead to a radioactively-powered electromagnetic counterpart which,if discovered, would enhance the science return of a GW detection. As verylittle is known about the optical properties of heavy r-process elements,previous light curve models have adopted opacities similar to those of irongroup elements. Here we report that the presence of heavier elements,particularly the lanthanides, increase the ejecta opacity by several orders ofmagnitude. We include these higher opacities in time dependent,multi-wavelength radiative transport calculations to predict the broadbandlight curves of one-dimensional models over a range of parameters (ejectamasses from 0.001 to 0.1 solar masses and velocities from 0.1 to 0.3c). We findthat the higher opacities lead to much longer duration light curves which canlast a week or more. The emission is shifted toward the infrared bands due tostrong optical line blanketing, and the colors at later times arerepresentative of a blackbody near the recombination temperature of thelanthanides (T ~ 2500K). We further consider the case in which a second massoutflow, composed of 56Ni, is ejected from a disk wind, and show that the netresult is a distinctive two component spectral energy distribution, with abright optical peak due to 56Ni and an infrared peak due to r-process ejecta.We briefly consider the prospects for detection and identification of thesetransients.

Effect of a High Opacity on the Light Curves of Radioactively Powered Transients from Compact Object Mergers